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Your farm is an outlier though, not representative. The current consumption levels of meat can only be sustained with factory farming, it's impossible for your

Your farm is an outlier though, not representative. The current consumption levels of meat can only be sustained with factory farming, it's impossible for your type of farm to contribute a meaningful amount of production. Meat is, in the context of mass consumption, factory farmed. Your farming method could not serve even a tiny fraction of demand, so while it is better than factory farming, it's not an alternative.

sjwalter 5y ago
It is currently an outlier, but my goal with the farm is to be riding the currently-growing wave of small farms directly marketing to consumers, who care deeply about their land, the local ecology, and the welfare of their animals. Our customers are so passionate about our product, it's quite shocking (this is Season 1 for us). As we get towards winter, we're going to start building a platform upon which we can foster competition--that's right, we want to have more and more small farms compete with us on pasture-raised, quality animal proteins. Over time, we want to be part of the vanguard that leads to Americans spending double on their diets and half on their healthcare. What's that quote about a small group of dedicated people? Farming, small farming in particular, is becoming trendy. Our product is in higher demand than we can produce. We've turned away customers. So we need to scale up a little bit, but more importantly, grow the numbers of our competitors and, year after year, eat the meat business. Healthcare premiums go down, slowly slowly, as people get healthier.
jbotz 5y ago
This is just not true, or at least extremely US-centric. In large parts of the world most meat consumed by the public still comes from small to medium farms and family agriculture. The globalized neoliberal agro-industrial complex has been whittling away at that, but it's still true in a lot of places, and it could be made true again in the US; the population density of the US is pretty low, there's a lot of land on which family farmers could produce meat humanely and sustainably. The only reason it doesn't happen is because agro-industry doesn't allow it, and they have captured the regulatory framework in their favor. If you changed the regulatory framework in a way that penalizes (or downright prohibits) a lot of these horrendous industrial practices sufficiently, then sustainable and human agriculture absolutely could fill the demand even of the very carnivorous American public (at somewhat higher prices, but not more than say double the price.) I'm not saying we shouldn't reduce mean consumption, just that the argument that sustainable and humane methods couldn't meet the demand are BS.
- sjwalter 5y ago
  This is a great point. One of the things several of our customers who hail from India have told us is that our chickens remind them of the chickens they got back home, and can still get back home, but are aside from small producers like us, unavailable widely in the USA.
judge2020 5y ago
This being true doesn't invalidate their point of the GP representing "consuming meat" in a bad light based on the acts of those cultivating factory-farmed meat. Nuance doesn't have to always be front-and-center, but when discussing a topic, i'd rather see major counter-points considered rather than omitted. Preferably with numbers and percentages stacked next to it.

sjwalter 5y ago

It is currently an outlier, but my goal with the farm is to be riding the currently-growing wave of small farms directly marketing to consumers, who care deeply about their land, the local ecology, and the welfare of their animals. Our customers are so passionate about our product, it's quite shocking (this is Season 1 for us). As we get towards winter, we're going to start building a platform upon which we can foster competition--that's right, we want to have more and more small farms compete with us on pasture-raised, quality animal proteins. Over time, we want to be part of the vanguard that leads to Americans spending double on their diets and half on their healthcare. What's that quote about a small group of dedicated people? Farming, small farming in particular, is becoming trendy. Our product is in higher demand than we can produce. We've turned away customers. So we need to scale up a little bit, but more importantly, grow the numbers of our competitors and, year after year, eat the meat business. Healthcare premiums go down, slowly slowly, as people get healthier.

jbotz 5y ago

This is just not true, or at least extremely US-centric. In large parts of the world most meat consumed by the public still comes from small to medium farms and family agriculture. The globalized neoliberal agro-industrial complex has been whittling away at that, but it's still true in a lot of places, and it could be made true again in the US; the population density of the US is pretty low, there's a lot of land on which family farmers could produce meat humanely and sustainably. The only reason it doesn't happen is because agro-industry doesn't allow it, and they have captured the regulatory framework in their favor. If you changed the regulatory framework in a way that penalizes (or downright prohibits) a lot of these horrendous industrial practices sufficiently, then sustainable and human agriculture absolutely could fill the demand even of the very carnivorous American public (at somewhat higher prices, but not more than say double the price.) I'm not saying we shouldn't reduce mean consumption, just that the argument that sustainable and humane methods couldn't meet the demand are BS.

sjwalter 5y ago
This is a great point. One of the things several of our customers who hail from India have told us is that our chickens remind them of the chickens they got back home, and can still get back home, but are aside from small producers like us, unavailable widely in the USA.

judge2020 5y ago

This being true doesn't invalidate their point of the GP representing "consuming meat" in a bad light based on the acts of those cultivating factory-farmed meat. Nuance doesn't have to always be front-and-center, but when discussing a topic, i'd rather see major counter-points considered rather than omitted. Preferably with numbers and percentages stacked next to it.